San Diego  Longtime Southeast San Diego community activist Jewell Hooper may be pushing 95, but don’t make the mistake of calling her retired.

This year’s recipient of the YMCA of San Diego County’s Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Human Dignity Award says she may be slowing down, but there’s still plenty of gas left in her tank.

“I think they’re giving me awards now to get them in before I die,” she said Monday, with an amused laugh. “But I went to the doctor a few weeks ago and he looked at me and said ‘Mrs. Hooper, nobody would look at you and think you’re 94 years old. I’d put you somewhere in your 60s.’”

For more than 50 years, the retired civil servant has been active in local community development, voter registration, political activism and senior education. Her efforts will be recognized Friday morning when the Jackie Robinson Family YMCA hosts its 29th annual Martin Luther King awards breakfast at the Town & Country Resort in Mission Valley. The sold-out breakfast for 1,200 — held each year on the Friday before Martin Luther King Jr. Day — honors the legacy of the late civil rights leader, as well as at least one local person who best exemplifies his life and works.

“She’s truly a jewel,” event chair Dee Sanford said of this year’s honoree. “She’s such a lovely lady and she’s done so much for her community.”

Hooper was among 40 people nominated by the public this year for the MLK Human Dignity Award. She was chosen for the prize by its past winners, who include Padres baseball great Tony Gwynn and his wife Alicia, Civil Rights leader Carrol Waymon, former Urban League President Ambrose Broadus, Assemblywoman Shirley Weber and local pastors Rev. James H. Hargett, Bishop George McKinney and Rev. Ray Smith.

“It’s really something to know that there are still people out there like Jewell Hooper who have walked in the same steps as Dr. King,” said Michael Brunker, executive director of the Jackie Robinson Family YMCA. “She spends every minute of her life doing good on Earth.”

Hooper, a Valencia Park resident, said she’s deeply honored by the award because it is named for one of her lifelong heroes.

“This day will not about me, who just made a few ripples in one city in this enormous country,” she said. “I want to celebrate someone who created waves nationally and internationally.”

Hooper moved to San Diego in 1957 with her older sister Carrine, whose engineer husband had been hired (through a minority recruiting effort) by Convair. They traveled from a segregated suburb of Washington, D.C., with the hope that San Diego would be more welcoming to middle-class black professionals. They were wrong.

“I didn’t know San Diego was segregated until I got here,” she said. “We did run into segregated areas on our journey here, but I had no idea that California wasn’t an open state. I lived to find out differently.”

The trio rented a room in the St. James Hotel (now the Ramada Gaslamp) and the sisters spent the next several days canvassing El Cajon Boulevard looking unsuccessfully for a motel room with a cooktop. Turned down at every stop (even at motels with vacancy signs), Hooper said a desk clerk finally leveled with her.

“He said ‘lady, I’ve seen you and this other lady driving up and down this street every day and you’re not going to find a vacancy on El Cajon Boulevard,’” Hooper recalled. “He asked me if I knew where Southeast San Diego is and he said I might have better luck if I looked for a place south of Market Street.”

Hooper and her late sister did find accommodations in the historically black communities south of Market, and Hooper has been there ever since.

One benefit of living in San Diego in the late 1950s was that for the first time in her 38 years, Hooper was eligible to vote in a presidential election (District of Columbia residents didn’t win that right until 1961).

“My first action when I came to San Diego was to register to vote and then it was to get my hands on one of those black books I could carry around to register other people,” Hooper said.

Nearly 60 years later, Hooper is still active in politics as a member of the Southeastern San Diego chapter of the League of Women Voters. She researches ballot propositions and shares what she’s learned with everyone she meets during elections seasons. She believes one of the nation’s biggest problems is uninformed voters.

“I think that big money is running politics in this country, from the president of the United States right on down to the garbage collector,” she said. “With all the special interests involved in the ballot measures, voters just aren’t competent enough to understand what they’re voting for.”

In 1970, Hooper took early retirement from her job as an accountant with the U.S. Navy because of stomach ulcers. A few days later she got a knock on the door from her neighbor, community leader Verna Quinn.

“She wanted me to go to San Francisco for some sort of meeting and I said ‘I just retired on disability. I’m sick.’ And she said ‘you’re not dead.’”

Hooper’s community efforts — many accomplished with Quinn, who died in 1998 — have been numerous. She has served on planning groups for Southeast San Diego, Broadway Heights and Valencia Park, was a local leader for the AARP, worked campaigns to elect minority representatives, taught driver safety classes to seniors for 20 years and was involved in successful efforts to preserve the Barrio Logan murals, construct I-805 on-ramps from Southeast San Diego neighborhoods and block dense apartment housing in Broadway Heights.

But her proudest achievement — which Hooper calls her “cup and bucket” — was a 10-year fight against the proposed Highway 252, which would have split in half the community of Southcrest near Barrio Logan. The highway project was scrapped in 1980.

Hooper will turn 95 in May, but she isn’t slowing down. She recently took an Alaskan cruise, regularly attends community college classes, and in March she’ll travel to UC Berkeley to be inducted into its 2014 class of California Senior Leaders.

Longtime friend Cynthia White-Parks, a 2010 California Senior Leader, said Hooper still has a lot to give.

“She’s such a wise and intuitive lady and her age means nothing,” White-Parks said. “She really cares about her community and is such a giving person. I just admire her. I tell her, ‘I wish I could touch you and absorb some of your wisdom.’ Young people could learn a lot from her.”

Hooper has promised White-Parks she’ll record or write down some of her stories some day, but for now she’s too busy living.

“Once a year we commemorate the life of Dr. King and celebrate people like me who made some ripples, but we should be taking up the fight to educate people on their obligations as citizens,” Hooper said. “People died to give us the right to vote but it doesn’t help much if we don’t know what we’re fighting for. If we have any obligation at all, it’s to be an informed citizen, and I’ll be fighting to spread that message until the day I die.”